The Arion Press announces its one hundred and fourth publication
THE LULU
PLYS
by
Frank Wedekind
a limited edition artist book with sixty-seven drawings
and a suite of four prints by
William Kentridge
to be published in the fall of 2015.
THE CONCEPT. For many years, Arion Press has exhibited at the fall Print Fair at the
Park Avenue Armory in New York City, where original prints from every era are offered by
dealers from around the world. In 2009, we had a visit there from the South African artist
William Kentridge. He purchased as a gift for his wife a copy of our edition of Squarings,
poems by Seamus Heaney with prints by Sol LeWitt. During our conversation, I asked if he
might be interested in making an artist book with Arion. He replied in the affirmative and we
agreed to correspond about possible literary works for such a project. Several ideas were
passed back and forth by email and during a meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he
was delivering the Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 2012. In 2010, Diana Ketcham
and I attended the New York premiere of a new Metropolitan Opera production of Dmitri
Shostakovich’s The Nose designed and directed by Kentridge. Following the success of his highly
original staging of The Nose, the Met invited Kentridge to do the set design and stage direction
for Alban Berg’s Lulu. He suggested that we use the libretto for that opera and his drawings
for an artist book. I was aware of the two plays by Frank Wedekind that are the basis for the
libretto. I had seen an experimental stage production in San Francisco in 1964, directed by Lee
Breuer, starring the unforgettable Susan Darby in her first leading role, and had purchased a
copy of the earlier play, Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) to revive my college German. So I proposed to
Kentridge that we print the plays instead of the libretto and give our readers the literary background of the opera. A more compelling reason for using the plays is that these works from
the turn of the last century changed the course of drama, not just in Germany but worldwide,
and have had a profound effect on film and opera as well.
THE PLAYS. Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (1864 –1918) was conceived in San Francisco
and born in Hanover, Germany, to a Swiss mother and a German father, and grew up in a Swiss
castle. He lived in Munich most of his adult life. He claimed American citizenship until the First
World War, when he was required to have a German passport. Initially, he worked in business,
then in the circus, and became an actor and singer. He starred in satirical cabaret and began
to write for the theater. At age 34 he became a dramaturg at the Munich Schauspielhaus. His
creative and sexual life was strenuous, to put it mildly, even though he became monogamous
after his marriage in 1906 to Tilly Newes, an Austrian actress, when he was 42 and she was 20.
They had two daughters. Wedekind died at the age of 53.
His first major play, Frühlingserwachen / Spring’s Awakening (1891) caused a scandal with
its homoerotic and sado-masochistic scenes carried out by young German students as the
characters. There followed the “Lulu” plays, Erdgeist / Earth-Spirit and Die Büchse der Pandora /
Pandora’s Box, published in 1895 and 1904, respectively. They were originally planned as a single
play. In the last act of the first play, Alwa, the son of Lulu’s lover Dr. Schön, envisions writing
a play about Lulu based on the action up to that point. In the first act of the second play,
Alva, who now holds a Ph.D. and also is called “Dr. Schön”, refers to the play he has written
about Lulu, which is entitled “Earth-Spirit”. So the character Alva stands in for the playwright
Wedekind. In the first production of Pandora’s Box, Wedekind himself played the role of Jack
the Ripper, who appears in the final act and kills both Lulu and her lesbian admirer Countess
Geschwitz.
In 1929, the silent film director G. W. Pabst released Pandora’s Box, starring Louise Brooks
as Lulu, which continues to be regarded as a great classic of the cinema. In the film adaptation
many details were changed, but the main story line was faithful to the Wedekind plays.
This publication honors the artistry of Frank Wedekind, a celebrated radical who was
censored, banned, and even jailed for his stage expressions against conventional behavior, although he aspired personally to upper-class respectability. His borrowings from circus, pantomime, vaudeville, and Grand-Guignol aimed to give pleasure and immediacy on stage rather
than a distanced literary satisfaction. An accomplished actor, Wedekind would demonstrate,
when directing, a harshly stylized technique of disjointed actions and puppet-like movements,
using, according to Berthold Brecht, his “metallic, hard, dry voice” in a riveting manner. He
influenced Expressionism, Dadaism, and the Theaters of Cruelty and the Absurd. In Brecht’s
estimation, Wedekind “belonged with Tolstoy and Strindberg among the great educators of the
new Europe”.
THE TRANSLATION. The translation we have used is from Trajedies of Sex by Frank
Wedekind, translation and introduction by Samuel A. Eliot, Jr., New York, Boni and Liveright,
1923. The volume contains Spring’s Awakening (Frülingserwachen) and Damnation (Tod und Teufel),
as well as the two Lulu plays. Because the copyrights date from 1914, the work is in the public
domain. Eliot’s text has been somewhat modernized by Arion editors. Samuel Atkins Eliot, Jr.
(1893–1984) was the grandson of Charles W. Eliot, a long-time president of Harvard, and was
educated at that college. He wrote about theater, did translations, and was co-author of a
book on birds of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts.
THE OPERA. Alban Berg’s Lulu (1937 / 1979) is a masterpiece of twentieth-century opera.
The Austrian composer Berg (1885 –1935) began to teach himself music when he was fifteen
and later studied with Arnold Schoenberg for six years. In 1905, at the age of twenty, he had
seen a production of Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box, staged in Vienna by his friend Karl Kraus, and
determined to create an opera version. But work on his other opera, Wozzeck, intervened,
as well as instrumental, orchestral, and vocal pieces, so he did not begin his Lulu until 1929.
The opera was left uncompleted at his death in 1935, although he had finished the third act in
particell format (short score). His wife Helene Berg forbade completion of the final act and
allowed only performances of the first two. But after Helene’s death, the opera was completed
by Friedrich Cerha and premiered in 1979 in Paris, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Berg himself
had written the libretto, which was very faithful to the two Wedekind plays, even down to
constructing the scenes in the three-act opera to follow the seven acts in the two plays. As a
composer, Berg was influenced by his teacher Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique and by his
theory of developing variation. They were lifelong friends, and Berg dedicated Lulu to Arnold
Schoenberg in honor of his sixtieth birthday,
The Kentridge production of Lulu opens at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on
November 5, 2015, sung in German and conducted by James Levine. There will be eight performances, through December 3. This is a co-production with the Dutch National Opera and
the English National Opera. On October 13, 2015, Kentridge and Hoyem will speak about the
Lulu project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
THE ARTIST. William Kentridge was born in South Africa in 1955, into a family of lawyers
active in the campaign against apartheid. He attended the University of Wiwatersrand in Johannesburg, studying politics and African history, then fine arts at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, then theater in Paris at Ecole Jacques Lecoq. A draughtsman, sculptor, filmmaker, and man
of the theater, Kentridge worked out of his studio in Johannesburg, independent of currents
in the American and European art world, for more than a decade. His major work from that
period is a cycle of films that allegorize South Africa’s political upheavals. Kentridge’s persistent
involvement in theater, as a designer and actor, is evident in the large body of charcoal and pen
and bush drawings linked to his films and to opera projects, which include a series on Mozart’s
The Magic Flute. His graphic work continues the satiric tradition of Daumier, Goya, and Hogarth. By the early 1990s, Kentridge was participating in the Venice and Documenta biennales
and garnering worldwide recognition. A travelling retrospective organized in 2009 opened at
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and ended at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York in 2012. Among his awards are the Kyoto Prize (2010), Oskar Kokoschka Award (2008),
the Kaiserring Prize (2003) and the Carnegie (International) Prize (2000).
images from the lulu plays
Left to right, top to bottom: Lulu as Pierrot; Dr. Goll dead, staring; Customer at the door; Countess Geschwitz dying
THE IMAGES. William Kentridge writes: “The drawings in this book were made between
2011 and 2015 for use in the production of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu. The drawings are to be
projected onto the stage set, each image being broken up by the different layers of scenery
the projection encounters on the stage. Sometimes a detail of an image is projected, sometimes the entire image is projected to a size of around 11 by 20 meters. The images used in
the production span the period of the plays at the turn of the twentieth century to the opera in the early 1930s. Amongst the images are translations from Beckmann, Kirchner, Klimt,
Nolde, Kollwitz, as well as images from documentary and fictional films of the period.”
Kentridge drew with brush and ink on dictionary pages. The definitions are in the background as texture but the opening and closing words at the tops of pages in larger type can be
read. Often, after drawing, Kentridge moves the sheets, rearranging elements of the drawings
so that they become collages and can seem like moving pictures. The appearance of the drawings on the pages of our book is quite different from when they are enlarged and projected.
Unlike the opera audience, readers experience the entire image on an intimate scale.
As the designer of the book I have established the sequence of the 67 images through the
front matter (frontispiece, introduction), the first play, Earth-Spirit, with its prologue and four
acts, then the Entr’acte between the two plays, and the second play, Pandora’s Box, in three acts.
Kentridge was welcoming to my interpretations of where the pictures should be placed in the
text, and made several key suggestions.
The sequence begins with portraits of Wedekind, Berg, and Schoenberg, then follows the
story line of the drama. The prints show the influence of films from the 1920s and 1930s,
as Kentridge acknowledges above. Also, he has used existing photographs and artworks as
sources for his portraits of Wedekind’s characters. As a conceit, he has used historical figures to represent certain characters, such as having the young Alban Berg play the son of Dr.
Schön, Alva; Gustav Mahler play the Count Casti-Piani, a high-class pimp; Richard Strauss play
the banker Puntschu; and Sigmund Freud play the Stage Manager, who has no speaking lines in
the play. The soprano singing the role of Lulu in the Metropolitan production, Marlis Petersen,
whose hair is in the style of Louise Brooks, is portrayed in some of the depictions of the Lulu
character in the book. To warn the reader of the violence in the plays, the endpapers evoke
spatterings of blood.
We have created an entr’acte section, separating the two plays, because Alban Berg wrote
into his libretto that the opera should have a film sequence at its mid-section, showing Lulu’s
arrest, trial, and incarceration, then her escape engineered by the Countess Geschwitz. The
cinema director Heinz Ruckert shot a silent film to the composer’s specifications. The original
film has been lost, so subsequent productions have had new movies made to comply with the
composer’s wishes. The current opera production, too, has a film, directed by Kentridge. The
entr’acte in this book does not depict the same events as do the films. It serves as a visual intermission and shows Lulu going to pieces as she undresses.
Each Kentridge image is identified at the bottom of the page. The dialogue is set in bold
type, printed red, with character names and stage directions set in the regular weight of the
The Suite of Prints
Four linoleum block prints, larger and
different versions of images in the book
and with different titles, in portfolio, to
accompany copies of the book.
Paper: English mouldmade 300 grams,
24-7/8 x 19-3/8 inches.
Edition: 40 sets, signed by the artist.
This page:
1. Lulu; 2. Akarova
Facing page:
3. Her Shadow; 4. Jack
William Kentridge signing prints with printer
Mlungisi Kongisa in Johannesburg.
type printed in black. As an aid to the reader, a synopsis of the opera libretto precedes each
act, following the divisions of the original drama with seven scenes corresponding to the seven
acts of the plays. The synopses and titles of the plays are in both German and English.
THE BOOK. The book is folio, 13-1/4 by 9-1/2 inches, 172 pages. The paper is Hanemühle
Biblio. The types are from the period of the composition of the opera and creation of the
Pabst film: Perpetua (1929) and Gill Sans (1928) in Monotype composition, with handset
Perpetua, Claudius (1937), and Neuland (1923) for display. The first two types were designed
by Eric Gill in England; the second two types were designed by Rudolf Koch in Germany.
The metal types were printed by letterpress on a two-color Miller cylinder press. The drawings were printed by four-color offset lithography. The book is handsewn with linen thread
over linen tapes, with handsewn silk headbands in black and red, and bound in full gunmetal
grey cloth, in a slipcase covered in the same cloth. Both book and slipcase cloth have titling
in type and imagery drawn by Kentridge printed by silkscreen, the word “Lulu” on the front
cover of the book and a Rorschach of black blood across the sides and back of the slipcase.
THE SUITE. In addition, Kentridge made four linoleum block prints based on images in
the book and titled somewhat differently, reproduced and identified in this prospectus. The
suite was editioned at M. K. & Artists Print Workshop by Mlungisi Kongisa in Johannesburg,
South Africa. The paper is Somerset Satin soft white 300 gm, 63 cm by 49 cm. The prints are
interleaved and are presented in a full-cloth portfolio with a title page giving documentation.
— Andrew Hoyem, Publisher
EDITION, PRICE, AND ORDERS. The edition of the book is limited to 400 numbered copies for sale and 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution to participants
in the project. All copies are signed by the artist. The price of the book is $2,000. The edition
of the suite of prints is 40 copies for sale, numbered 1/40 – 40/40, plus 5 artist’s proofs,
numbered AP 1/5 – AP 5/5, 5 publisher’s proofs, numbered PP 1/5 – 5/5, and 3 bon à tirer proofs,
numbered BAT 1/3 – BAT 3/3. All prints are numbered and signed by the artist. The price of
the book with the suite of prints is $18,000. The prints are not sold separately or individually.
Copies of the book are reserved for Arion Press subscribers and they are given priority of
purchase for the suite of prints. To place orders or for more information about this publication and subscription terms and discounts, contact:
THE ARION PRESS
1802 Hays Street, The Presidio, San Francisco, California 94129
www.arionpress.com • arionpress @ arionpress.com • 415-668-2542